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December 28, 2011, 6:41 pm
From North Korea, an Altered Procession
By J. DAVID GOODMAN and DAVID FURSTPostscript | In addition to the European Pressphoto Agency, both Reuters and Agence-France Presse transmitted the altered photograph shown above, at right, on Wednesday. The original Lens post, below, should have noted that E.P.A. was not the only agency to release the image. Both Reuters and A.F.P. issued a kill on the image after the Lens post was published. “Reuters strongly suspects that this handout picture from K.C.N.A. was manipulated at source,” Reuters noted in a picture kill notice transmitted Wednesday evening. A.F.P. sent a mandatory kill statement over the wire on Thursday. “This picture was altered from the source and not by A.F.P.,” the statement read.
Correction appended | The funeral of Kim Jong-il on Wednesday called to mind the best stage-managed Communist state productions: the falling snow, the wailing mourners, the perfectly spaced limousines and rows of chest-beating men.
So perhaps it was because the scene was so nearly impeccable that someone — an overzealous North Korean photo editor? — appears to have taken issue with an errant group of men, barely noticeable in a sweeping photograph of the procession in central Pyongyang, and removed them.
According to an analysis by The New York Times and the digital forensics expert Hany Farid of Dartmouth College, a photograph distributed by North Korea’s state news agency and transmitted by the European Pressphoto Agency was altered using Photoshop to remove the men after the picture was shot.
Another photo, taken from the same high vantage over the funeral route only seconds earlier by Kyodo News, a Japanese agency, and distributed by The Associated Press, revealed the changes.
In the Kyodo photograph, which appeared in Wednesday’s Pictures of the Day, six men are standing near a camera behind the assembled crowds. In the North Korean photo, the men — as well as the camera and their tracks in the snow — are gone.
Associated Press, via Kyodo News; Korean Central News Agency, via European Pressphoto AgencyThe time between the two photographs can be approximated by the position of the first limousine in the procession, which had moved roughly a car length in the time the two photographs were taken. (A red line was added to the photographs by The Times to highlight the movement.) Video of the procession broadcast on North Korean state television showed the cars traveling at a brisk walking pace when accompanied by the country’s new leader, Kim Jong-un, and other top officials, and more quickly when they are absent.
“Almost nothing changes,” Mr. Farid said in an interview. “Except where the men were standing.”
Mr. Farid, a computer science professor who specializes in digital photo analysis, said the manipulation was a simple matter of cutting out the men and cloning the nearby snow to mask the area where they stood. “It would have taken all of 30 seconds,” he said.
“But they were a little too quick in the cloning,” he added. “Some of the concrete is covered up by snow.”
Mr. Farid and photo editors at The Times focused on an area of concrete where the men are standing that is partially covered in the Japanese news agency photo. In the manipulated photo, the snow covers more of the concrete in precisely the area where the men had been pictured seconds before. Had they simply walked away — already highly unlikely given the time between the images — their tracks should have been visible in the snow, but they also disappear.
Associated Press, via Kyodo News; European Pressphoto Agency via Korean Central News AgencyFurther manipulation can be seen around a row of what appear to be low, round bushes. A man stands near the top of the row, and the defined line of the last bush can be seen in a close-up of the image, below. In the North Korean news photograph, bottom, the man is gone and the line of the bush is blurry — a telltale sign of masking.
Associated Press, via Kyodo News; European Pressphoto Agency via Korean Central News AgencyThe reason for doctoring the photo was not immediately known.
The European Pressphoto Agency did not respond to numerous phone calls. Just after 6 p.m., the agency issued a mandatory order, directing clients not to publish the photograph. “We have since been made aware that the image has been altered by the supplier, and the image was moved in error,” the notice said. “We apologize for any inconvenience.”
The North Korean photo briefly appeared on nytimes.com early Wednesday morning. The Associated Press noticed the disparity and contacted The Times. The photo was removed from The Times’s site.
In contrast to other recent notable examples of digital manipulation, like the 2008 addition of extra Iranian missiles in an altered photograph, the removal of six silhouetted men near the edge of the funeral procession appears to do little to change the content of the image.
A side-by-side comparison of the full images does point to a possibly banal explanation: totalitarian aesthetics. With the men straggling around the sidelines, a certain martial perfection is lost. Without the men, the tight black bands of the crowd on either side look railroad straight.
Perhaps it was a simple matter of one person gilding the lily.
Correction | An earlier version of this post misspelled the first name of Professor Farid. In addition, Dartmouth College was incorrectly referred to as Dartmouth University.
Correction appended | The funeral of Kim Jong-il on Wednesday called to mind the best stage-managed Communist state productions: the falling snow, the wailing mourners, the perfectly spaced limousines and rows of chest-beating men.
So perhaps it was because the scene was so nearly impeccable that someone — an overzealous North Korean photo editor? — appears to have taken issue with an errant group of men, barely noticeable in a sweeping photograph of the procession in central Pyongyang, and removed them.
According to an analysis by The New York Times and the digital forensics expert Hany Farid of Dartmouth College, a photograph distributed by North Korea’s state news agency and transmitted by the European Pressphoto Agency was altered using Photoshop to remove the men after the picture was shot.
Another photo, taken from the same high vantage over the funeral route only seconds earlier by Kyodo News, a Japanese agency, and distributed by The Associated Press, revealed the changes.
In the Kyodo photograph, which appeared in Wednesday’s Pictures of the Day, six men are standing near a camera behind the assembled crowds. In the North Korean photo, the men — as well as the camera and their tracks in the snow — are gone.
Associated Press, via Kyodo News; Korean Central News Agency, via European Pressphoto Agency“Almost nothing changes,” Mr. Farid said in an interview. “Except where the men were standing.”
Mr. Farid, a computer science professor who specializes in digital photo analysis, said the manipulation was a simple matter of cutting out the men and cloning the nearby snow to mask the area where they stood. “It would have taken all of 30 seconds,” he said.
“But they were a little too quick in the cloning,” he added. “Some of the concrete is covered up by snow.”
Mr. Farid and photo editors at The Times focused on an area of concrete where the men are standing that is partially covered in the Japanese news agency photo. In the manipulated photo, the snow covers more of the concrete in precisely the area where the men had been pictured seconds before. Had they simply walked away — already highly unlikely given the time between the images — their tracks should have been visible in the snow, but they also disappear.
Associated Press, via Kyodo News; European Pressphoto Agency via Korean Central News AgencyAssociated Press, via Kyodo News; European Pressphoto Agency via Korean Central News AgencyThe European Pressphoto Agency did not respond to numerous phone calls. Just after 6 p.m., the agency issued a mandatory order, directing clients not to publish the photograph. “We have since been made aware that the image has been altered by the supplier, and the image was moved in error,” the notice said. “We apologize for any inconvenience.”
The North Korean photo briefly appeared on nytimes.com early Wednesday morning. The Associated Press noticed the disparity and contacted The Times. The photo was removed from The Times’s site.
In contrast to other recent notable examples of digital manipulation, like the 2008 addition of extra Iranian missiles in an altered photograph, the removal of six silhouetted men near the edge of the funeral procession appears to do little to change the content of the image.
A side-by-side comparison of the full images does point to a possibly banal explanation: totalitarian aesthetics. With the men straggling around the sidelines, a certain martial perfection is lost. Without the men, the tight black bands of the crowd on either side look railroad straight.
Perhaps it was a simple matter of one person gilding the lily.
Correction | An earlier version of this post misspelled the first name of Professor Farid. In addition, Dartmouth College was incorrectly referred to as Dartmouth University.
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...and I am Sid Harth@sidileaks.com
49 Comments
Share your thoughts.Seems to me the second shot, the altered one, is a wider angle shot with the cameramen removed, presumably the North Korean camera was at a slightly different height/distance. It would be interesting to see the location(s) of the cameras, were they on cherry pickers or on a building??
Damnatio memoriae
or this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_Soviet_Union
http://www.ap.org/newsvalues/index.html
"AP pictures must always tell the truth. We do not alter or digitally manipulate the content of a photograph in any way.
"The content of a photograph must not be altered in Photoshop or by any other means. No element should be digitally added to or subtracted from any photograph. The faces or identities of individuals must not be obscured by Photoshop or any other editing tool. Only retouching or the use of the cloning tool to eliminate dust on camera sensors and scratches on scanned negatives or scanned prints are acceptable.
"Minor adjustments in Photoshop are acceptable. These include cropping, dodging and burning, conversion into grayscale, and normal toning and color adjustments that should be limited to those minimally necessary for clear and accurate reproduction (analogous to the burning and dodging previously used in darkroom processing of images) and that restore the authentic nature of the photograph. Changes in density, contrast, color and saturation levels that substantially alter the original scene are not acceptable. Backgrounds should not be digitally blurred or eliminated by burning down or by aggressive toning. The removal of 'red eye' from photographs is not permissible."
This is much ado about nothing. Because of abuses, we've become over-paranoid about Photoshop use, but even before the age of digital photography, news images were frequently airbrushed or otherwise manipulated.
Ultra-Orthodox Paper Erases Hillary Clinton From Iconic Situation Room Photo
May 9, 2011
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/05/09/ultra-orthodox-paper-erases-hilla...
That should be Hany Farid of Dartmouth College. (http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/Hany_Farid/Home.html)